Dancing with DALF: Towards a Digital Archive of Letters written by Flemish authors and composers in the 19th and 20th century

Correspondences of authors and composers with colleagues, friends, family, journalists, critics, illustrators, musicians, editors, etc. contain an invaluable source of information for the study of the genesis, production, meaning and reception of their work, the reconstruction and a better understanding of the literary or musical contemporary society and mentality in which they lived, worked, loved, and interacted with an audience, and for biographical study. Historical and critical letter editions are the best ways to make such corpora of letters available for a wide(r) audience. Editions of this kind always comprise both the letters written by a given author or composer and those addressed to him or her, guarantee the reliability of the presented text, provide registers e.g. on people and titles, and contain contextualizing essays.

National location registers and union catalogues of manuscript materials are instrumental for the study of the literary and musical heritage in general, and the planning and production of such editions in particular. Up to now such registers have been unexistent in Flanders (Belgium). That's why Flanders missed participation in the by the Council of Europe initiated MALVINE programme (Manuscripts and Letters Via Integrated Networks in Europe - http://www.malvine.org). MALVINE wants to put catalogues of manuscripts and letters of European archives, musea, libraries, and documentation centres on-line by building an electronic network which is independent of heterogeneous technical solutions and cataloguing traditions locally used by the data providers, and which is accessible to the end user from all over the world via low cost personal computers and web technology (Lieder 1999).

Since August 1st 2000, the Centrum voor Teksteditie en Bronnenstudie (CTB - Centre for Textual Criticism and Document Studies), an independent research unit of the Royal Academy of Dutch Language and Literature (Ghent, Belgium), focuses on the study and valorisation of the Flemish literary and musical heritage on the basis of a gradually growing (i.e. project based) inventory of manuscripts and letters written by Flemish authors and composers of the 19th and 20th century. In this context, several letter editions are being prepared for publication. Since the CTB is the centre of expertise in electronic scholarly editing in the Low Countries, these new projects will take place in an electronic paradigm. Therefore, a methodology and an open system architecture must be set up (and agreed on) for the digitization, markup, and presentation in on-line, off-line and hard-copy spin-off products of correspondence material. The main issue is to make the contents of such letter editions available via the integrated approach which is potentially present with the SGML-based on-line catalogue Agrippa of the Archief en Museum voor het Vlaamse Cultuurleven (Archive and Museum of Flemish Cultural life), the central repository of modern manuscript material in Flanders (http://lib.ua.ac.be/AMVC).

The current research-project will result in a Guide to Good Practice which will be normative for every single letter editing project of the CTB, and which will be used by graduate and undergraduate students who prepare (partial) editions as part of their training. This way, the CTB wants to guarantee a permanent compatible input to a gradually growing Digital Archive of Letters written by Flemish authors and composers in the 19th and 20th century (DALF). Further, by making use of TEI-compliant or -based SGML and XML markup schemes for the markup of every single letter transcription, DALF can - under governing copyright legislation - result in an on-line text archive on the WWW, or generate several types of publications.

Taking Scheibe's "Some Notes on Letter Editions" (Scheibe 1988) as a starting point for an analysis of the kinds of materials to expect for inclusion in DALF, and my remarks concerning the problematic use of TEI for the markup of letters (Vanhoutte 1999), this paper will discuss the several approaches to the creation of letter editions currently being undertaken by different projects, and will confront them with the international theoretical differences which exist in the three main schools of scholarly editing: the German, French, and Anglo-American schools. From this the paper will draw a possible typology, and will conclude with a critical evaluation of the strenghts and weaknesses of the TEI guidelines for encoding manuscript letters.

References

Lieder, Hans-Jörg (1999). "MALVINE — A Future Gateway to Manuscripts on the Internet." editio. International Yearbook of Scholarly Editing, 13, 215-222.

Scheibe, Siegfried (1988). "Some Notes on Letter Editions: With Special Reference to German Writers." Studies in Bibliography, 41, 136-148.

Vanhoutte, Edward (1999). Ruling the Screen: compromising decisions and decisive compromises. Paper. DRH 99 (Digital Resources for the Humanities), London (UK): King's College London, 14 september 1999.